The first song on Brian Kelley’s new Sunshine State of Mind album may be the most important. “Boat Names” is a different kind of love song that finds a man promising that one day, he’s going to give the girl he loves a boat named after her.
The song is a show of commitment early in a relationship that Kelley says he was toying with for some time before involving co-writers Casey Brown and Parker Welling. “Yeah, it’s a dreamer love song,” he tells Taste of Country Nights.
“One of these days / I’m putting your pretty little name on the back of a 45-footer,” he sings to start the mid-tempo chorus, singing over an acoustic guitar and production that’s soft in comparison to FGL songs. “It might sound crazy but one day / I’m gonna make your name one of them boat names.”
“That was the first song I wrote for the project. And that was the guiding light and also the anchor,” Kelley shares.
“At first, I took some time off last year from May — when Tyler (Florida Georgia Line partner Tyler Hubbard) and I turned in our fifth record, we were done — I took some time off, and just did some soul searching,” he recounts. “Played a lot of guitar, wrote in my journal, spent a lot of time with God and Brittney and our dogs, and just was doing everything under the sun, really, other than music. I got my arm back in shape for pitching. I was doing it all.”
When Brown and Welling were booked for his songwriting appointment, Kelley figured he’d bring this song for them to help finish. At the time, there wasn’t a vision for the expansive music video he dropped on Friday (June 25). He didn’t even own the boat! Bethany Ashton Wolf brought them the idea for a short film that finds young versions of themselves falling in love and then passing the torch to real-life BK and Brittney Marie. The script was powerful.
“We started crying reading it down, like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is absolutely incredible,'” he recalls thinking. “I love the mini-movie idea, and I think it’s, some of it’s been done before in a sense, but for me and Brittney and our love story, showing that, it’s just … it feels fresh to us and we couldn’t be more excited to get it out.”
The Kelleys now own a boat, and it’s appropriately called the Brittany Marie. That was a big moment for him — and them as a couple — and it came after a long year spent together with their four dogs, largely isolated from the world during the pandemic.
“I wrote it true to being a dreamer, and just being like, ‘Hey babe, one of these days I’m gonna make your name one of them boat names. We’re gonna do it,'” he says.